2013-2014 Year of Garden Coordination By Molly Travis

I can’t believe it’s already been a whole year since I started working in the gardens! It looks similar to the end of last year, when the prime harvest season unfortunately begins near the beginning summer.  We’ve had a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including cherry tomatoes until November and yummy greens from the Urban Garden and greenhouse. Sure, we shared some of our produce with our animal and insect neighbors; but as part of the growing cycle, we all benefit by sharing.

One of my favorite projects and accomplishments from this year are the beautiful display of tulips and daffodils behind B-1. It was the first display of springtime in the garden! Another thing that was fun to transform was the empty aquaponics system that we turned into a permaculture keyhole bed. I hope everyone has enjoyed some of the potatoes and nasturtiums that have grown from it. Garden workshops and lessons were probably my favorite, including fruit tree pruning, garlic planting, and mosaics! I can see all of the things that we have been involved in throughout the year, and the garden looks all the better for it.  Thanks everyone for the great year! 

WoOp! WoOP! Words from the KitcHen KreW by Madeline Thompson

Working in the kitchen this year has been super fun and exciting!!!

We have learned so much about growing and cooking organic food and most of all building community. Our time in the kitchen has certainly taught us a lot of things, for example making the most of what you have and using the pantry and gardens to their fullest potential. Some days we just rolled with the punches and made some of the best meals out of the simplest ingredients. Sometimes we washed too many dishes or stayed too late, and even cursed the one burner stove. However at the end of the day we ate in good company, which made it all worthwhile.

While strolling through the gardens and watching everything grow one of the best things about being in the kitchen was eating and cooking the apples in the fall and the lemons in the winter. Picking and eating the berries off the vine was also the best. I even started a love/hate relationship with the mustard greens in the B-quad, for they had showcased far too many times in our meals. I learned about picking different varieties of lettuce, watching the garlic grow, and I also became quite fond of the calendula petals that adorned our lovely organic salads. I even discovered new spices, herbs and the magic of Kaffir lime leaves for curry-based dishes. I learned new recipes, such as Greek Dolmas and Erica’s famous peanut butter dressing, though sadly I can never seem to get it to taste like hers. Other great uses in the garden were the green tomatoes from summer harvest that were cooked into a lovely plant-based chili. The solar oven was also a favorite cooking instrument in which we made various kinds of vegan cookies.

Learning about our food systems and where our food comes from has taught me to really appreciate the labor, time, and effort to plan out the PICA gardens. Events such as the Food Justice Fair and cooking for the Annie Leonard Luncheon were also both memorable highlights and honors which I will always treasure. Most of all, I have enjoyed working in the kitchen this year laughing with folks, meeting new people, and making lifelong friends who share the same interests of making and breaking bread together.

I am ever so thankful for working with Mira and the leadership crew this year, for they have taught me so much. I hope to continue to support PICA and make it the best sustainable intentional community for years to come.

May we all continue to share our knowledge and carry a little PICA with us wherever we go!

Madeline Thompson

Saturday Community Meals Coordinator

The Composting Process: A Metaphor and Sustainable Resource

Hello fellow PICAns and villagers! My name is Alex Eisele (eyes-lee) and I am this years compost coordinator for PICA. Compost is a great way to produce healthy, organic, sustainable and nutritious fertilizer for your garden. It is a beautiful (albeit smelly) link in the sustainable agriculture chain that connects the various end products of food production and consumption with the first stages of amending garden beds before planting. The best thing about composting is that anyone can do it, seeing as how we all eat food and thus produce food waste.  Here at PICA, using the food waste generated in the village houses, we use a six-bin hot composting process, which is the fastest way to produce a sterilized, nitrogen-rich soil amendment. Although this process yields the quickest and most nutritious compost, it also requires the most attention. First we build a pile in bin #1, using a combination of food scraps (no meat, dairy, or cooked foods please!), straw, fresh plant trimmings and weeds; various dried twigs, leaves, and plant matter; horse manure, and some water. The pile sits for a week as healthy, microscopic bacteria-buddies begin aerobic decomposition, creating an internal heat that reaches 130-150 degrees farenheit, killing all harmful bacteria and unwanted seeds. The pile is turned, once a week, down the chain of bins until it reaches bin #6, where after sitting for another week, it is sifted.  The finished compost is dumped in the Foundational Roots, B-quad garden, and the larger leftovers are put into the “Bi-Sift” bin and used as a bacteria-boosting amendment when building a new pile.

Although at PICA we use a hot compost process, there are a few different ways to produce compost, creating plenty of options to choose from when figuring out which method will work best for your schedule, yard size, amount and type of food waste, etc.  In addition to hot composting, there is also cold composting, which includes worm composting (vermiculture), and underground compost.  In cold compost, you simply build a pile or heap of intermixed layers of food scraps, plant materials, soil, and manure (if you have it) and let it sit stationary for three months to a year. Sometimes worms are added to the pile in a process known as vermiculture, which is a very good method if you do not have a lot of space to dedicate to compost.  A healthy worm compost will be contained in a bin or tub (as you don’t want your worms to leave you) which is poked with holes for airflow and drainage.  Add about one-half quart of food scraps per week (more or less depending on the size of your pile and amount of worms) and use shredded newspaper, straw, dried leaves and/or grass trimmings for a top and bottom layer of the worm pile. The worms feed on the bacteria which grow on the food scraps, producing what are called “castings”, the finished product of vermiculture. Underground compost simply involves digging a small hole, placing a 4-6 inch layer of food scraps in it, and burying it for about six months.  The upside of cold compost is that it does not take as much work to manage since it does not need to be turned.  The downsides are that it takes a much longer time to yield a finished product that product is not as nitrogen-rich as hot compost, and you may have to deal with unwanted seeds and spores.

            The composting process, whichever method you use, is a perfect example of recycling and sustainability. It is a metaphor for struggle and growth, the challenges we face , as it takes the waste remnants of the gardening process, and turns it into a vital source of life. I love my job as compost coordinator for many reasons, one of which is it’s metaphorical value. After high school I was a scared, depressed, self-conscious individual who, despite my best attempts, let the negative experiences in my past (various traumas and regrets) rule my future. Over the next six years I began to really look at those experiences, and confront them with intent to heal, and through the therapeutic writing of poetry (where I discovered my love of metaphor), recycled them into a strength which helped me make my most immediate dream come true: transferring to UCSC and beginning to change the world for the better, one sustainable step at a time.

About the author: Alex Eisele is the PICA Compost Coordinator for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Cooking and Community with Madeline Thompson

Cooking has always been an integral part of my life. I am happiest when I can serve a good meal to the people I love. It starts with one idea, the one main dish that develops with flavor through the slow labor of love. Every ingredient is carefully thought out to please the palate and open the senses to a gastronomic journey. My purpose is to remind one of childhood memories or newfound dreams found within a warm bowl of soup, filled with herbs and aromatics. Cooking with the seasons is very organic and supplies your body with the exact nutrients it needs during each season. Cooking is a service to me, a pleasure, an art that I co-create on the magical easel of the PICA gardens. I have had of some the most incredible experiences over the past two quarters facilitating a work group with some amazing PICAns and volunteers. Working every Saturday has given me the upmost privilege to be in a space where the love of food and community is shared and adored. I am thankful that I can share my love of cooking which came from my grandmother who migrated from Mexico over seventy years ago. Her inspiration helped me to understand the concerns of people and the ability to comfort people in times of need. I value this gift and continuously use her wisdom to service people through their stomach. I believe this is the way to heal individuals from the inside out. Today I would like to share a recipe for Caldo Tlalpeño that was inspired from a trip I took in 2012 to the beautiful state of Guanajuato, Mexico. This soup is especially good for kicking a cold and warming your bones. Try it with a variety of vegetables in season and Spanish rice or add chicken if you desire.

¡Buen Provecho! 

Check out this awesome recipe at: http://picarecipes.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/caldo-tlalpeno-veggie-chickpea-chipotle-soup/

About the author: Madeline Thompson is the Saturday Community Meals Coordinator at PICA.

PICA and a Very Brief History of Agriculture

There is no denying the great effects that agriculture has had in the evolution of human beings. Allowing for a domestic lifestyle, agriculture has given humans the opportunity to develop complex societies with advanced and expansive technologies. Domestic lifestyles dividing humans into separate populations ultimately allows for both cultural and biological human variation. When people are presented with problems they work to find solutions and these fixes whether internal or external are either convergent or unique. Human evolution occurs within environments that they both inhabit and distort affecting the process of adaptation.

Agriculture is the one of the very first examples of humans drastically altering their environment. This led to the development of cities and with that a removal of the interaction with nature and the environment. When food production can be removed from the human experience, the understanding of where food comes from, what it is for, and the process of nature cultivation is nonexistent or distorted. This is one of the main reasons PICA exists.

Program in Community Agroecology is a good scope through which to view the production of agriculture within human society. It is a group of people that exist in conjunction with the environment, and cultivate the land in order to sustain it. PICA is a place at our university that allows for students to become connected with the production of their food. A process that is often far removed from the table is now right in the backyard. With knowledge of gardening practicum, PICA community members are given the chance to understand the effects of a thirteen thousand year old practice.

When people are close to the creation of their sustenance, a great appreciation for the Earth can take place. An understanding of what it takes to be human and a better idea of hard work can be generated. PICA produces a very close knit community by creating an environment in which students spend a large portion of their time working together. This community takes patience and emphasizes group collaboration to organize community efforts in the garden and group meals.

Agriculture developed independently around the world exemplifying the human tenacity for cultivation technology. Archaeologists find evidence dating the beginning of agriculture in Egypt to be as early as 12,000 BC and in Asia in 10,000 BC. The Fertile Crescent began cultivation of wheat, barley, and legumes in 7,000 BC to 5,000 BC. The inhabitors of the “New World” produced crops of maize, beans, squashes, and potatoes in 5,000 to 3,000 BC. [i] About 88% of all humans alive today speak some language belonging to one or another of a mere seven language families confined in the early Holocene to two small areas of Eurasia that happened to become the earliest centers of domestication — the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.[ii] Agriculture allowed for the advanced development of these societies.

Like the development of farming practice around the world, UCSC has pockets of garden and farming communities on its campus. Some of these gardens were developed in partnership with each other, but many came about independently. This pattern of production exists on large scale and on the small scale, as seen here on our campus. Each community is unique in design but all function as systems of food production and are valued for their educational experience. PICA provides students with the opportunity to learn gardening skills as well as functions as an agroecology community, developed and continued by a dedicated and diverse group of students.

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[i] Hughes, J. Donald. An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life. 2nd ed. only. New York: Routledge, 2009.

[ii] Diamond, Jarod. “Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication.” Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group, 08 Aug. 2002. Web. 04 Mar. 2014.

About the author: Zoe Manoguerra is the Residential Assistant for PICA at the Village for the 2013-2014 year.